Facilities like storage rooms in hospitals, fast food chains, retail store chains, logistics centers, group of purchasing organizations and the like use large quantities of consumable articles on a daily basis and thus constantly need to track the status of such consumable articles and make sure sufficient quantities of each product are ordered on time so that these articles are always available when needed.
In many cases, the consumable articles are stocked in a plurality of supply rooms in the facility (or in individual retail stores and the like) where they are readily available for use. Those articles are usually not controlled on a per “item level” but on a bulk level, and the usage of the individual article is not reported to the information systems, for example, a package of 100 napkins (or 40 toilet paper rolls) as opposed to tracking napkins or toilet paper rolls individually. As a result, not having usage information for an article can create a situation in which the store room faces Out Of Stock (OOS) situations for an article, including sometimes of critical articles. In order to avoid OOS, the organization typically needs to spend considerable time in counting and creating complex and inefficient reporting mechanisms for inventory control and on-time reordering. The daily counting or replenishment requests are usually sent to the organization's central storage area or logistics center for replenishment. A central supply room (or central storage area) may receive all the orders fulfilled by the different suppliers. The orders are then dispatched from the central supply room/center to the different supply rooms, retail stores etc.